The article reminded me of Bork and his Slouching toward Gomorrah because of Articleman's thread. I was thinking of putting a comment there but I didn't want to ruin Articleman's emphasis on the tactics of borking and what resulted from it. That though the tactics were regrettable, the threat to life as we know it from Bork turned out to be real. Some would say that Bork went that way because of the borking itself, but Andrew Sullivan is one that argued that wasn't the case, see page 17-18 of Sullivan's essay for the 1998 NYT Magazine, "Going Down Screaming." Sullivan was more conservative back then than he is now, just left on social freedom issues, yet he saw Bork as a very dangerous fellow finally outing himself as one in that book, not just a conservative legal scholar.

Not that I think that Chinese Party councils or Borks on the Supreme Court can forever control cultures once they are out of the bottle, but it's the resulting dysfunctions that the societies have to endure with black markets (i.e., the Prohition lesson) and all that kind of stuff, the endgame loss of respect for rule of law, etc.

While the tactics may have been regrettable, I shudder to think of what might have happened with him on the court once he felt free to attempt to shape the culture, at that point in time especially. I do think he was/is a much worse jihadi against our culture than any of the others sitting on the bench now.